Panflute

Pre-ordered Mass Effect Legendary Edition!

Whelp, we had elections again in the Netherlands and somehow our prime minister's party got even more votes than during the previous elections, numerous scandals notwithstanding.

We went into our first full lockdown today. Merry Christmas.

It expired

Can't decide if I'm more annoyed by the people completely ignoring corona guidelines or the ones who secretly film it so they can narc on them for internet coolpoints.

As I have said earlier, all this virus does is revert countries to their basic essence. Holland has reverted to finding compromises for everything (polder model) The US has reverted to its usual dose of crazy paired with societal division France has reverted to its leader getting to roleplay as a firm Napoleonic statesman over the backs of his countrymen Italy and Spain have reverted to criticizing us for 'mishandling' the crisis and then asking us for free hand-outs as the bodies pile up and their entire economies inevitably collapse at the slightest setback It's depressing.

It's pretty fucked now. We have had rising infection rates, but people have pretty much gone into panic mode, where like 3 days after new measures, everyone starts calling for more measures even though it's impossible to notice the effect of the original measures within that timespan. If we were to go into full lockdown, it would be the first time this happens in the country, as the previous 'lockdown' and the current one have both been partial lockdowns, where much of the measures were based on advice rather than strict legislation. Still, I don't think it will ever be in countries like France and Italy where you basically have martial law. However, as it looks now, it seems as if the full lockdown is not being considered by our government, which, to its credit, doesn't often cave to the pressure of taking extra measures just because people are panicking. The issue with a full lockdown now is that it would just postpone the problem a few months at best, and wreck tons of businesses in the process. The past months have shown that our testing has not proven adequate enough to be able to handle subsequent infections locally, so this would mean having to lock the country down periodically until there is a vaccine, which is obviously bonkers. I dunno about this shit anymore. When I see people out there walking by themselves in parks while wearing mouth masks, I get the idea that a lot of this is just about giving ourselves the illusion that we're able to control the virus.

We might go into full lockdown as well seeing as journos have been pushing for it in the past weeks by aSkiNg QuEsTiOnS. Critics say such a measure will only be effective if it is kept up for months, possibly until the spring. Fun times ahead in any case.

The first Borat was one of those comedy movies where all the funny stuff was in the trailer. Can't imagine the new one to be much better as we've already seen the whole 'haha Americans are stupid' shtick played out to death in the Bush era.

I believe we will see it, but I also think future instalments of Fallout and Elder Scrolls will have vastly different business models that focus heavily on microtransactions (thinly veiled or not).

To a degree. Multiple people have seen ads advertising ethnic dating sites specifically on this website alone, so it has to be something to do with the way ads are run here as well.

Our minister of justice saw fit to call everyone who didn't comply with corona rules lowlifes and then had a wedding with like a hundred guests where he hugged and shook hands with everyone. There is tons of photographic evidence of this. Take a wild guess as to whether he got fined and/or was relieved of his responsibilities.

They aren't, everybody gets those ads.

I now use Opera GX which is basically Opera but with sleeker design. It has an inbuilt VPN which is rather rudimentary but still functional, as well as a forced dark mode for every website and compatibility with all Chrome etensions. It's also takes a lot less juice to run than some other browsers. Others I've tried: - Chrome: prefer not to use it because fuck Google - Firefox: was a nice browser until it became the biggest resource hog on the market - Yandex: a nice Chrome-based browser with some interesting features, but I stopped using it after it automatically set every page to German for some reason